Geography

Sudan, in northeast Africa, measures about one-fourth the size of the United States. Its neighbors
are Chad and the Central African Republic on the west, Egypt and Libya on
the north, Ethiopia and Eritrea on the east, and South Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, and
Democratic Republic of the Congo on the south. The Red Sea washes about
500 mi of the eastern coast. It is traversed from north to south by the
Nile, all of whose great tributaries are partly or entirely within its
borders.

Government

Military government.

History

What is now northern Sudan was in ancient times the kingdom of Nubia,
which came under Egyptian rule after 2600
B.C.
An Egyptian and Nubian civilization called Kush flourished until
A.D.
350. Missionaries converted the region to
Christianity in the 6th century, but an influx of Muslim Arabs, who had
already conquered Egypt, eventually controlled the area and replaced
Christianity with Islam. During the 1500s a people called the Funj
conquered much of Sudan, and several other black African groups settled in
the south, including the Dinka, Shilluk, Nuer, and Azande. Egyptians again
conquered Sudan in 1874, and after Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, it took
over Sudan in 1898, ruling the country in conjunction with Egypt. It was
known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan between 1898 and 1955.

The 20th century saw the growth of Sudanese nationalism, and in 1953
Egypt and Britain granted Sudan self-government. Independence was
proclaimed on Jan. 1, 1956. Since independence, Sudan has been ruled by a
series of unstable parliamentary governments and military regimes. Under
Maj. Gen. Gaafar Mohamed Nimeiri, Sudan instituted fundamentalist Islamic
law in 1983. This exacerbated the rift between the Arab north, the seat of
the government, and the black African animists and Christians in the
south. Differences in language, religion, ethnicity, and political power
erupted in an unending civil war between government forces, strongly
influenced by the National Islamic Front (NIF) and the southern rebels,
whose most influential faction is the Sudan People's Liberation Army
(SPLA). Human rights violations, religious persecution, and allegations
that Sudan had been a safe haven for terrorists isolated the country from
most of the international community. In 1995, the UN imposed sanctions
against it.

On Aug. 20, 1998, the United States launched cruise missiles that
destroyed a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Khartoum which
allegedly manufactured chemical weapons. The U.S. contended that the
Sudanese factory was financed by Islamic militant Osama bin Laden.